I noticed that when a new event is imported into MUIR using the 3 DBF files, the players are sorted by their pairing number (the D_PAIR_NUM field in the tdexport.dbf file).
After submission, when viewing the rated event, the players are sorted by their score. It would be nice if they were sorted this same way during submission, as well. That would make it easier to review the contents.
For reference, the file format: US Chess Federation
Russellb, does your tournament running software not order players by score and rating before the 3 files are created?
Yes, it does.
The rows in the file are ordered by their rank (score, and potentially tiebreaks). The pairing number is set to the number assigned to each player at the beginning of the tournament. The records in tdexport.dbf might be something like:
row 1: player D with a score of 3, pairing number of 4
row 2: player C with a score of 2, pairing number of 3
row 3: player A with a score of 1, pairing number of 1
row 4: player B with a score of 0, pairing number of 2
During submission, when reviewing the details before submission, the players are listed in order: A, B, C, D.
After submitting and being rated, viewing the event shows the players in the expected order: D, C, A, B.
I could change the pairing number to match the rank to get the MUIR UI to do what I want, but then the field isn’t actually the pairing number anymore, so that seems wrong, too.
I don’t think the MUIR data structure would support this. When an event is being worked on, it can either be from an upload file or entered online.
The main problem is the ones entered online, because they have no score at all yet, so there’s nothing to order them by except the order in which they are entered, ie the pairing number. And if it was ordered by score groups, everybody’s pairing number (ie, the row in which they appear in the online editing form) could change after each round.
It would make even less sense to have the editing form look something like this after round 4:
6 Joe Brown 4.0 .
2 Sam Smith 3.5
4 Bob Jones 3.5
5 Tom Major 1.0
1 Wes Kelly 1.0
3 Jack Riley 0.5
Even with events uploaded from the 3 DBF files, it is possible to add players and add rounds before submitting the event for rating, and either of those could impact the sort order the players are shown in, ie, their pairing number.
We just had the planning meeting for July today, but I can pose this question to staff and to the developers to see if they’ve got an idea for a middle ground approach, though at first glance I can’t come up with one.
We’ve also had discussions with several of the pairing program authors about a new upload structure for uploading events directly from the pairing program without having to create the 3 DBF files.
In this new structure, we’ve talked about adding a field for ‘final order’ that would come from the pairing program, including tiebreaks. Note that this COULD be different from score group order, if there were asymmetric results or extra games (like a player who got a bye in a round playing a house player), so it might actually have to be two fields;
Final Score for prize purposes
Sort Order for prize purposes
This might help address the questions we frequently get (usually from parents) like “Why did my son get the 3rd place trophy when the crosstable for the rated event shows him in 2nd place?”
I expected to hear the display is just for ratings and that standings/prizes etc are best handled by the organizer on their final tournament report. I believe this opinion was expressed several times in the past. Prizes may not look like ranking because of eligibility (e.g. withdrawal prize policy)
One issue with implementing this is knowing if the TD did anything to support the alternate ranking - most TDs I know using Swiss-Sys or WinTD do not use a lot of the features/cleanups that make their final reports match what happened as long as the results of the games are there.
When I show newbies’ parents tournaments results on MUIR I have always mentioned to ignore the order. Very important when the TB is external to the reported data — blitz playoff game(s)
so the short answer, I think, is that I shouldn’t use the “pairing number” field to actually reflect the pairing number from the tournament. I should just set it to the final rank. Then the players will show up how a TD would expect. It doesn’t seem like the pairing number is used for anything else anyway. Does that sound right?
Depending on what pairing program you use, it may be able to do that for you automatically.
The pairing numbers ARE used, at least indirectly, if one is entering an event online, which is the case for about 15% of events we rate, most of them fairly small.
I think it’s desirable during the time one is editing an event for the pairing numbers to remain fixed so there isn’t confusion when editing the event. Once the event is rated, resorting into score groups or a ‘final standings’ field is appropriate.
I could see if someone was using the online form for tracking pairings and results during an event, like a one-game-a-week event, having something like a ‘resort into scoregroup order’ button that changes the pairing numbers to match the sort order, but NOT something that happens automatically!
In an ideal world, I would also add a text field for ‘prizes’ to an updated format for submitting events, but I’m not sure if TDs would use it and it would need to be sanitized to make sure it didn’t contain embedded links, etc.